In January of 1995, Netscape (All
Praise the Company) moved from
our old, tiny offices on the 5th floor of
an office building at 650 Castro Street into new offices in our own
building at 501 East Middlefield. New offices on which vast sums of
money had been spent. New offices designed by someone who watched
entirely too much Star Trek. The decorator seems to have had a
real fixation here; it was a sea of cubicles, but they were at funny
angles to each other, and the walls were light beige with a dark red
raised stripe running down the middle. It was so Starfleet it's not
even funny. I felt like I should be blowing a
whistle and saying ``permission to come
aboard'' when I arrived.

Something had to be done.

So, the first day we moved in was a pretty lousy day, and I was stressed
out about various shit involving having to move my machine, crawl around on
the floor, find longer cables, and so on. The usual ``moving is a drag''
scenario.
I needed a tension reliever in a big way, so
Lou and I drove down
to the friendly neighborhood army surplus store, and I bought about five
hundred square feet of camouflage netting.

The guy at the store seemed kind of surprised. I don't think they sell
a lot of that stuff. I'm not sure he really believed my credit card wasn't
stolen.

At this point, it's safe to say that I now had the coolest, scariest
cubicle in the world. I hung the netting from the ceiling tiles with
short pieces of phone wire, so that it draped down and covered the walls
of the cubicle. It also made a nice door: people actually asked
``can I come in'' before hassling me. Feature! And nobody could
ever figure out how to get in to my office -- they just
could not accept the fact that, yes, you had to reach down and lift the
curtain, you couldn't just slide it aside. Sometimes when I was feeling
particularly ornery I'd just sit there and watch them struggle and get
more and more uncomfortable with the unfamiliar paradigm instead of
telling them lift it up. Hee hee hee. Wiggle in my net, little
flies.

The net is fairly transparent, but did a nice job of cutting down the
awful life-sucking glare of the fluorescent lights. While inside, it
really gave the feeling that you were out in the woods. The only thing
that was missing was some tapes of birds and screeching monkeys or
something.

The next day, someone told me that the architect guy who designed the
place (he of the Trek fixation) freaked when he saw my little ``tent.''
They tell me he got all red in the face and said things like ``this
is his way of saying FUCK YOU to me!''

Some people really take their jobs too seriously. I mean, I've never
met the guy. But it does seem likely that if I had been around and he
got all hot and bothered at me, the phrase ``fuck you'' might well have
been bandied about.

Someone donated a big rubber battle-axe to hang on the door, but I think
what was really called for was more of a South Seas theme; bamboo
spears, shrunken heads on sticks, maybe a big rusty propeller, or part
of an airplane fuselage, to really give it that cargo cult look.
(Donations graciously accepted.)

Deep Thought:
I think there's someone whose job it was to attach the camouflage parts to
the net part by hand. They're held together with little bits of stiff wire,
placed fairly randomly. I think that that must be a
really lousy job.

During the first two weeks of the Age of the Tarp, it kinda smelled; it
had, after all, been sitting rolled up on the shelf of an army surplus
store for who knows how long.
And when I unrolled it, there were, in fact, dead leaves in it, so this
net is not exactly new. I ran a fan in here at night to air it out,
while Lou and
Garrett whined about it
a bit. Their office abutted the Tent of Doom, you see. However, I felt no
guilt, because their office is also the location of the
Amazing Fish-Cam,
and when it is being cleaned (which clearly isn't often enough, or the fish
wouldn't die with such horrific regularity) it smells absolutely awful. Dead
fish, dead fish, dead fish everywhere. At one point there was a small yellow
fish whose fins were tattered and whose left eye had completely rotted away.
That Montulli guy, he's a monster, I tell you, a monster!!

Ahem. Sorry. Got a little carried away.

A few months after it went up, there were photographers running
around doing yet another fashion shoot with
marca. (This kind
of thing happens all the time around here. He is the Internet's Own Poster
Boy after all.) Anyway, one of them had this high concept
idea -- wait, that's a net. A net is kind of like a web. Wow!
World Wide Web! So they descended upon my cube, filled it with red light,
and took lots of pictures of Marc making faces and holding the rubber axe and
so on. I think they said they were from Newsweek.

I'm told that I'm not the first person ever to accessorize with camo
netting; check out this highly amusing message.

Oh, by the way, you may have noticed that the first picture on this
page, the one of the striped hallway, has a nasty moiré pattern
in the carpet. That's not just an artifact of the image; the carpet in
this place really looks like that. Especially
late at night. After you've been here for
enough hours, it seethes and writhes at you as you walk down the hall,
skittering away from your feet, taunting you, whispering at you, telling
you to do horrible things to your coworkers in its quiet,
insistent voice. Or maybe that's just me.

Meanwhile, a Year and a Half Later...

In June of 1996, we moved again, this time to 685 East Middlefield, just
down the street. We still occupy the previous building, and at least four
others, but the engineering department was shuffled off to new territory
this time.

At first, I planned to retire the Tent of Doom at the move; I thought
that it had had its time in the sun (so to speak) and perhaps it was
appropriate to give this story an ending. (One must strive always to
maintain proper narrative structure in one's life and surroundings.)

But then I got email from someone in facilities telling me that they
had been instructed to move and re-hang my net, and asking if I had any
particular handling or hanging requirements!

Well I thought that this was way funny; the net, once
reviled, had now been explicitly added to the move schedule by some
unknown middle-manager. Wow. With treatment like that, perhaps the
net should remain! I asked around, and everyone else thought so, too.
It was a landmark, I was told, even a tradition. But the most
compelling argument was that the net had become a part of the Netscape
Tour; it had been on Japanese television multiple times, someone said:
how could I think of taking it down now?

Ok.

So we moved, and my net ended up in a big pile just outside my
cubicle. I knew that, after the move, fire marshals were known to be
lurking around inspecting things, and the net didn't seem like
something they would look on too fondly, so I attributed the delay in
it being re-hung to that: waiting for the fire marshal to get lost.
But after a few weeks, I asked facilities what was up. Their response?
Nobody in facilities was willing to take on the awesome responsibility,
so perhaps I should do it myself. Sigh. Very well then.

Now, my old office was right in the middle of the engineering
department's sea of cubicles, so the net was a fairly imposing sight.
But my new cubicle differs from my old one in three important ways:

it's tiny;

it's in a corner;

it has a window.

These three things together would make the old tent-like configuration
rather less dramatic. A new approach was called for.

So one night, in a burst of cleansing synchronicity,
Raven,
Frederick, and I
embarked upon the greatest engineering project that the southeast corner of
685 East Middlefield had ever seen. We hung the net in the open common area
which sits between my office and the
Fish-Cam. Rather than
dangling down to create walls as before, it now spills out along the ceiling,
thus appearing to be about four times larger than before. Which is fitting,
since everything in this new building seems larger than before.

Whimper, No Bang.

February 1998.

The company occupies 14 buildings; my office has been moved three times in
less than a year. I gave up on moving the Tent of Doom, and last I heard, it
was rolled up under Frederick's desk.